That response is, however, provoked by the persistent framing of the discussion as one primarily about law and societal allowance. The "can you" rather than the "should you". I'm an adult and don't need Mama Government telling me what vidja I can and cannot have. That is also a real issue that was fought for and in some place is still being fought for, and shouldn't be dismissed. Germany prohibited sales of Half-Life until the fictional soldiers were replaced with fictional robot soldiers, which in addition to being censorship is also a sign of how absurdly petty the world is, but that is an existential crisis for another day. Plenty of places have laws that don't let you run game programs for more than a few hours at a time, mostly targeted at MMORPGs. But I think that all people should have the opportunity to throw their lives away playing video games, lose everything meaningful to them, and kill themselves in the depths of hellish loneliness. The rights to live, die, and choose and all that.
Now, to its credit, this article doesn't do that and explicitly calls against both legal censorship and self-censorship, though admittedly this also brings into question exactly what the hell the writer
is calling for. Criticality without alternative might be all well and good for making yourself feel accomplished in having stated your opinion, but the rational response of everyone else in the world should just be the delete button.
The argument about war is flawed because it fails to make the distinction between the effects of war and the effects of video games (or anything media) about war. This isn't the "it's not real" response per se, though I do maintain that the fiction argument is a valid response to pretty much all of this. If video games can't make you commit violence it reasonably follows that they also cannot make you dismiss the humanity of the enemy. But getting back to the point, a video game about a war does not necessarily spread acceptance of war violence, it spreads acceptance of video games. The WWII or Vietnam or whatever war is being presented is a flavor hash taken from human history, but even the author points out games that use entirely fictional wars. If the dehumanization is carried through to the game from reality, then what's the connection Killzone has to our bubbling desire to kill every Helghast fuck in the system and let God sort them out? Because they're Space Nazis fighting Space America, so this is actually just WWII? Fuck off, everything we put into media is ripped straight from the headlines of something else.
The Holocaust is the obvious example, but Americans also did their fair share of dehumanizing killing, particularly in Japan. You can’t really firebomb Tokyo or nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki if you think the Japanese are human beings with friends, parents, lovers and children.
And you certainly can't do this.
Oh yes you can. There's plenty of examples of philosophical positions where you can recognize your enemies as human and then kill them all. From both a utilitarian and deontological standpoint. Hell, that's what so scary about some really committed utilitarian types, because they'll tell you with a straight face that we need to exterminate half of humanity through random selection to save the other half from resource collapse. Even the classic example of justifying the nuclear bombings is utilitarian: less people die from all sides added together when nukes are used, therefore use nukes. That argument treats all people as of equal worth, though I don't agree with it myself. All in all, I have to chalk this up to someone who loves using the word "dehumanization" too much. I've had a decent amount of experience with the "what is dehumanization" fight and it's a nasty one. What I've found is that people don't get the idea very well and soon enough you've got loser Westerners comparing their every struggle to the Holocaust, including struggles that are perceptual and don't exist. The exploration of thought has to give way to our relatively certain knowledge of the real world at some point or it isn't worth anything.
Maybe we compartmentalize and remind ourselves that war isn’t really like that. But at the end of the day, we are — on some level — accepting the premise that watching people shoot at each other is one of the most entertaining things a person can do with their time.
[EYEROLLING INTENSIFIES]
Yeah, ok, so while we're "maybe compartmentalizing" (if you cannot compartmentalize vidjia into the vidjia box, please vanish in a puff of logic because you are either not real or an alien), let us take a moment to realize that the premise you are accepting on some level is shooting fake people is entertaining, which it is, because it simulates something exciting, which violence is. Humans love violence. Hands down, without question. The excitement of these things is why we keep looking into it, and it is without moral charge. It came from us in the first place, and was interjected into fiction for that reason. When you say that societal and media acceptance of violence makes us accept violence, you've got it backwards. When we have violence in media it is because we have already accepted our interest in violence enough to make media out of it.
This post is more or less redundant after this, but my last response is the "what we can do about it", which is basically a call for universally critical media. To which I say, god no, please fucking no, we have enough antithesis in the world to kill any 90's emo band in existence. No more. No more!
Author
Topic: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread (Read 1273954 times)